Chris Boylan
These shields are from the New Guinea Highlands and a major feature is their colour. This is very much part of the New Guinea tradition to have colourful shields so that when the warriors are out fighting in the hills and the valleys the shields stand out very strongly from the landscape.
These shields all come from the same region, the eastern end of the Waghi valley, now known as the Jiwaka Province in Papua New Guinea’s Highlands. These are probably the biggest shields ever made, three or four warriors would hide behind each shield which would defend them from arrows.
But before we talk about the shields, can I just take a step back and give a little introduction to the New Guinea Highlands and set everything in historic perspective.
Humans first arrived in New Guinea 60,000 years ago; they came down through Asia and probably about 30-40,000 years ago they moved up into the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and so settled in the valleys which were fertile, surrounded by forest that teemed with wildlife for these (initially) hunter gatherers. And, for the rest of history they were very isolated, they didn’t come back down to the coast and the coastal people didn’t travel up.
For these 30,000 years we could say that the Highlands was isolated from the rest of the world; other migrations came through New Guinea but they bypassed the Highlands.
Over that time the peoples of the Highlands developed a very rich culture, technologically stone age but on all other levels it became a very sophisticated society. By 10,000 years ago, rudimentary irrigation began, draining fertile garden areas, in what was then a wetter climate with many lakes through the large valleys. About 8,000 years ago these irrigation drains became quite sophisticated – and, to put in historical context – the irrigation in the Middle East and Mesopotamia began around 10,000 years ago – so the same human developments were happening in the New Guinea Highlands as were happening in what we call the cradle of civilisation, in Egypt and the Middle East.
The Germans arrived as colonisers in the 1870s and 1880s. The distant high mountains were given German names – the highest Mt Wilhelm after the German Kaiser; Mt Hagen after the German administrator – but they were considered to be uninhabited and never explored. Little did they realise a million people inhabited these montane valleys.
In the 1930s Australian gold prospectors, accompanied by an Australian patrol officer, first entered the Highlands. Soon after, colonial personnel, traders and missionaries arrived. A priority of the new administration, PNG being a League of Nations trust territory, was the suppression of warfare. Fighting largely ceased from the 1950s until well into the early 1980s, when it slowly started to re-establish itself again. With Australian administration education became widespread in the 1960s in the highlands, so that by the 1970s there was the first generation of Highlanders who could read and write.
Enter The Phantom comics in the early 1970s and also being serialised in the newspaper, this comic book hero became incredibly popular. Written by American author Lee Falk, The Phantom was set in Africa in the jungle. While it never became very popular in the United States, The Phantom comics were popular in India, Turkey and Brazil as well as Australia and Papua New Guinea. Unlike most of the superheroes of the time, The Phantom relied on his wits, physical strength, skill with his weapons, and fearsome reputation to fight crime.
And so, the Phantom and his adventures entered the mindset of young Papua New Guinean young people growing up in the 1970s and 1980s; young people learning to speak English, read and write, were encouraged by reading The Phantom.
These people who related to the adventures of the Phantom, grew to become the new generation of warriors of the day, as warfare re-asserted itself. They initially copied traditional designs, but also introduced new motifs, that related to football, beer and, almost naturally, The Phantom. And The Phantom fitted so well with the cosmology of the Papua New Guinea Highlands for a number of reasons.
- Firstly, a warrior of the Papua New Guinea highlands has to be very resolute and strong, morally superior; the Phantom very much projected these qualities.
- He was a protector of less fortunate people which the highlands people also loved.
- The Phantom was a man who had generations of ancestors behind him and often in the comics you would see the Phantom standing in front of all his ancestors; the people related to this very strongly, seeing that the Phantom had the power of his ancestors.
- In Highlands cosmology, newly deceased spirits stay around the village while everyone they knew in this life is still alive, then slowly drift up into the high mountains. This is where the Phantom lived – his Skull Cave in the upper mountains.
- And probably most important, “The Man Who Cannot Die”, sometimes written on shields, or its tok pisin equivalent.
The Phantom shields were first painted in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. The people who generally painted the shields were not the warriors themselves; they would employ signwriters to design and paint the shields. With The Phantom comic’s popularity, The Phantom became iconic as an image on the wooden war shields. However, in the 1990s the introduction of guns into warfare resulted in the wooden shields gradually becoming obsolete.
For a short time, metal shields were used; employing the roof of a car or a rolled out 44-gallon drum, they painted similar designs, and there would be some protection from shotguns. However, within a couple of years, high-powered rifles and more sophisticated weapons started to be used and these shields disappeared altogether in warfare.
We only know the names of three or four artists; we don’t know many of the artists’ names.
The artist who painted the Skull cave, John Wahgi, is still alive even though he hasn’t painted the Phantom shields for some years. He loved The Phantom and comics in general and many of his shields reflects a comic-like appearance.
We see pistols appearing on the shields as the pistols are introduced into tribal warfare and the Phantom appears brandishing pistols.
Early shields featuring The Phantom were often filled with mainly traditional abstract designs – triangles down the sides and across the top – with a simple Phantom head. Slowly the phantom design came to dominate the shield and the traditional elements disappeared.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as wooden shields could no longer be used in warfare, a market developed for these shields; they became an art object rather than a war object. This was fuelled by a number of events. An anthropologist from the British Museum, collecting contemporary shields in the mid-1990s, Michael O’Hanlon, (who later showcased these at the Museum of Mankind in London) was a great source of inspiration to these emerging artists. These Highlanders, who initially painted shields for warfare, saw that they could also possibly be recognised as artists. Michael O’Hanlon and art dealers (including myself) were their road to recognition and a wider market. Thus, began a truly innovative yet homegrown development of a PNG Highland art movement.
All these shields in this exhibition here at Michael Reid Gallery have been sourced from Australia, many collected personally by me in Papua New Guinea. In the 1990s and early 2000s the Highlands had “raskol” problems, roskol being the tok pisin word for criminal. I was one of the few dealers from overseas that ventured into the Highlands over this period and was lucky enough to follow the nurturing of this new art form.
These artists were the first to paint written words on shields. One memorable shield had “Wantok kaikai Wantok” written, saying “Friends kill Friend”. Apart from the Phantom, other contemporary images and words incorporated into shield designs included rugby league teams, cigarettes, beer (including South Pacific or SP) and other symbols from the outside world, so newly encroaching on their society. Highlanders are great innovators, and they incorporated the changing world to theirs, specifically here, onto their shields.
There was a rugby league competition sponsored by Cambridge cigarettes where the saying went,
“We play football together and we fight together
We drink beer together and we fight together
And the Phantom will protect me as he is in battle as he is “The Man Who Cannot Die”.